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Prologue
All troubles begin with a lady, Gabriel thought grimly as he held a pistol in his shaking hand. Cold sweat ran down his forehead as his stomach twisted and churned inside.
At least, allhistroubles began with a lady.
First, Lady Wakefield, one of his former lovers, had sicced her husband on him once he severed their association. Poor bastard was so wrapped around her finger he didn’t understand what was going on or what Gabriel’s crime against his wife was. After that incident, Gabriel had wanted nothing to do with the lady. However, when Clydesdale, Gabriel’s friend, needed a favor from her, Gabriel knew he could procure it easily if he promised one last tumble. He couldn’t very well refuse to help his oldest friend.
Then Lady Stanhope, a young and eager tigress of a woman, who always threw flirtatious glances at him, accosted him in the ballroom of the aforementioned Lady Wakefield, at the same time as his planned assignation with the mistress of the house. Gabriel was bored, so he decided to have a tryst with her before Lady Wakefield arrived. Predictably, he got caught, and this little error earned him two invitations to a duel from the aggrieved husbands—which he, of course, ignored—and one letter from Gabriel’s sire. The Earl of Winchester was cutting Gabriel off.
His latest troubles, however, all began with one particular lady.Hislady. If he was honest, the entire ordeal at Lady Wakefield’s ball and what followed was actually her fault, too, even if not directly.
He’d done it for her. Everything he’d done recently had been for her.
He wiped the errant drop of sweat off his eye and concentrated on his target some twenty paces away. And today, he would die for her, too.
